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Data, Collaboration, Open Government

Broadband Access in Alameda County

The digital divide is a very real and very stable reality in communities like Oakland, California. Knowing which neighborhoods have solid access to high speed internet is a critical aspect of planning for government and nonprofit provided online services- if we want low income folks from Oakland’s flatlands to use a new digital application, we’d damn sure better know how many households in the target areas likely have decent speed internet hookups at home! Luckily for us the FCC collects reliable data on this and they publish it freely at a local level.

I took the raw tract level data and joined it to census tracts in QGIS, calculated a new string field called “res_fhsc_per_1000hhs” and calculated the real rate values to display in the map legend and popup- the raw data contains coded values that correspond to real numbers- so 5 means a rate of 800-1,000 per 1,000 households. The GeoJSON file was then loaded into a CartoDB mapping system.

As with most social phenomena, Oakland’s east and western flatlands stand out as parts of the county with quite low home broadband. Those communities may have internet via very slow services that many modern web sites won’t run well over (these data include all services providing over 200kbps – try using the web on a 256k plan in 2014!). The data are for 2010 Census tracts and were last collected and published for December 2012. Many households will have improved access since then and we also know from Pew research that many minority communities use mobile devices as a primary means of internet access.